


stay in my arms, if you dare

by intrajanelle



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura and Adam are for reals dead so sorry they did you like that, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, M/M, background - Shiro/Curtis, friends to lovers to exes to friends to lovers, i didn't watch season 8 so the Atlas is just the Enterprise, past - Lance/Others, probably inaccurate descriptions of texas wildlife, she/her pronouns for pidge, ~Growth~
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:20:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25227451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrajanelle/pseuds/intrajanelle
Summary: Lance and Keith have sex six months after the world almost ends. In the aftermath of their brief relationship they try to figure out how to be friends again. Or, several times Lance is forced to see his ex and one time it’s just Keith.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 53
Kudos: 91





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annaincognita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annaincognita/gifts).



> I wrote this based on an ever-changing headcanon of @annaincognita’s for post-season 8, for her birthday! I wrote it but it’s entirely her ideas so those belong to her. I really hope I did it justice! Also, there is only one true OC in this fic, many of the OC’s I stole from Beast King GoLion, the show Voltron was based on, so any resemblance therein is because I definitely stole stuff lol. Uhhh, I didn't rewatch Voltron for this and I don't plan to, so that's why stuff may be different ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> This fic is done and I'll be posting a chapter every few days until July 28, Lance's birthday!
> 
> Actual Title: From 'I Have Nothing' by Whitney Houston  
> Alternate Title: thank u next by annaincognita

When Lance woke the first thing he recognized was the smell of pancakes and then he looked up and realized he was alone in Keith’s bed. He laid there unmoving for several minutes holding the pieces of the last twenty four hours together in his brain, trying to make a cohesive picture. 

There weren’t many pictures that ended with Lance naked, rumpled, smelling of tequila, with a pounding headache, in Keith’s room at Shiro’s house, but, hey. Lance was willing to give himself the benefit of the doubt. Then he heard a boisterous laugh downstairs — Hunk — followed by Keith’s voice, gritty with fatigue but amused, shouting, “Hey, hey, not the bacon!”

And it all came rushing back to Lance, like a shitty projector switching from slide to slide. 

One slide: Shiro’s terrible idea to have a housewarming party for his new place near the Garrison, on the anniversary of when they first jetted into space on Blue, with massive amounts of alcohol. 

Another slide: Missing Allura so much that it felt like someone had reached in his chest and squeezed his heart all over the floor, followed by copious amounts of tequila. 

A third slide: Keith following him around all night like a shadow, culminating in an arm around his shoulders and laughter as they reminisced about their adventures on Shiro’s new porch swing. Followed by some breaking in of Shiro’s new porch swing that Lance is sure Shiro never anticipated, slash, Lance now felt hot and embarrassed about. Especially since they had eventually moved the proceedings to an appropriate location. Hence, why Lance was filthy and tired in Keith’s bed.

Lance stared at Keith’s vintage Akira poster.

The past few months had been good. Different. But good. His family was building a community farm nearby, cultivating plants that were extinct on other planets, and donating crops to local food banks. They also had a fairly successful farmer’s market presence, where Rachel sold her organic shampoo. 

Lance had moved into a bunkhouse at the farm. He tended to his animals, his crops, and his family, he ate dinner at 5:30 each night at a table long enough to seat the entire New Altean counsel. He went to bed at 8 p.m. and woke each morning to the sunrise. To a routine.

The only thing nonstandard about his life at the moment was Keith. Sometimes Keith would show up at two in the morning. Lance would wake up to find Keith on his couch, Kosmo curled around his coffee table. When Keith woke they’d race hoverbikes through the untilled fields. Or Keith would swoop in on a Friday and take him dancing, to the movies, to a rocky cliff in the desert where they’d trace the stars from memory and talk about nothing at all.

Lance didn’t mind mixing up his routine if it was for Keith. Everyone else was too careful with him, too cognizant of exactly how much time it had been since Allura. 

Six months, one week, three days. Four days now.

Keith was the only one who treated him exactly the same. Still shoving Lance into piles of leaves and arguing aimlessly about classical music — clearly, Whitney Houston was the best classical musician to ever live. Keith liked The Killers. Whoever they were.

Looking back, Lance should have known they were headed in this direction. They had been orbiting each other for as long as he could remember. He could recall so many versions of Keith throughout the years and so many versions of himself to match him. Two stubborn kids jettisoned into space without warning, freshly made paladins trying to prove their worth, pieces of themselves chipping away with loss and betrayal, only to be reformed into two new people. Harder and older, but familiar. Still circling each other, growing in tandem. 

That Lance had been the one to push Keith down on the porch swing last night wasn’t important, what was important was that Keith had been watching him like he was already taking his clothes off. 

They had always been ready for the next step at the exact same time.

Lance could hear someone vaulting down the stairs, most likely Pidge. Shiro never woke before ten these days, if he could help it. He claimed he was catching up on years of missed sleep. 

He sat up, still in Keith’s bed, still naked, and looked around for his clothes. His pants were inside out on the floor by the door and his button up was missing a couple buttons, hanging off the edge of the mattress. He distinctly remembered his belt slipping off the porch last night into the darkness of Shiro’s hedges. His underwear was nowhere to be seen.

He sighed and got up to face the music.

+

Lance tiptoed down the stairs, but Kosmo still heard him. The space wolf’s head popped up from behind the couch in the living room and he padded right over for pets. Lance obliged for a few moments, digging his fingers into Kosmo’s pelt. When he entered the kitchen, Kosmo was right on his heels. 

Hunk was overseeing Keith as they made breakfast. There was a huge stack of pancakes, toast, bacon, and now they were scrambling eggs. Keith was trying to put hot sauce in but Pidge kept knocking it out of his hand.

“Just because you can’t handle it—” Keith was saying, but he cut off as he looked up and noticed Lance leaning in the door frame.

Keith looked good. He always looked good, but these days, well, sometimes he entered Lance’s field of vision and he was all Lance could fucking see. 

Lance had thought he had a crush back at the Garrison, even way back when Keith had stupid hair and odd-fitting clothes and was several inches shorter. That crush had only ever grown louder in the back of his mind, until it was a constant buzz, impossible to ignore. And now, while Keith stood in boxers and a well worn sweater, hair askew, smiling at Lance over a steaming pan of eggs, he realized that crush was truly the most obnoxious thing to ever happen to him. Whatever hesitation he’d felt this morning was knocked aside in the face of Keith’s dorky smile. He smiled back.

“Keith! The eggs are burning!” 

Okay. Maybe that hadn’t been steam.

They didn’t get a moment to themselves nearly all morning. Once Shiro woke up, breakfast was even rowdier. Everyone was talking over each other. Hunk wouldn’t stop ribbing Shiro about his date with Curtis next week. Pidge was yelling at Hunk about a paper he was writing on something about something to do with space carbohydrates. Lance kept shouting back at her that she was giving him a headache and that just led to more yelling. At one point, Keith’s entire elbow ended up in the syrup bowl and the resulting chaos led to him getting sprayed down by Shiro in the backyard. 

All in all. It was a fairly typical breakfast.

It was a Saturday, so no one had anywhere to be urgently. Pidge and Hunk spent a good portion of the afternoon destroying each other on Shiro’s new gaming system. Shiro and Keith made chili for lunch, while Lance kept Kosmo company. In the post-lunch fatigue, Shiro put on a baseball game and Hunk and Pidge joined him, groaning over their poor choices as they stretched out across Shiro’s several comfortable couches. 

Lance thought of joining them, but he noticed Keith slipping out to the porch. 

“Hey,” Lance said. 

Keith nodded back. He was sitting on the railing, facing the porch swing, looking out over the field next to Shiro’s house. Shiro had asked Lance earlier about maybe starting to grow some food out here and what would be best. 

Lance pictured Shiro out in the field in the summer, with a wide brimmed hat, weeding his tomato plants. Happy, healthy, and whole. The worst thing that could happen to him that day, getting burned by the blistering sun. 

“So,” Lance said.

“So?” Keith repeated.

“Was last night a one-time thing?” Lance asked, not looking at Keith while he did it. 

“I fished this out of the shrub,” Keith said, waving Lance’s belt towards him.

“Keith!” Lance shrieked, feeling weirdly like Keith was undressing him right there on the porch. Even though there were no neighbors for miles. He went to grab the belt from Keith, but Keith didn’t let go and used his grip on it to pull him right between Keith’s knees. 

“Do you want it to be a one-time thing?” Keith asked against Lance’s lips. 

Lance shook his head, already leaning in. 

“Okay, then it's a two time thing,” Keith said, when they parted. “Three? Four times?”

“Who’s counting?” Lance said, going back for more.

+

Over the next few days Lance and Keith danced around each other like a couple of twitterpated sparrows. It was embarrassing. Keith showed up at Lance’s bunkhouse nearly every day, with food or beers, and on one memorable occasion a bouquet of sunflowers.

They talked and bickered and mostly had sex. When Lance looked back on the past few months, he could see they’d been practically dating for awhile now. He considered asking Keith to move into the bunkhouse. They could work on the farm for the next few years, maybe open their own one day. Decades stretched out before Lance, a quiet, peaceful stretch of paradise. 

“We’re dating right?” Lance said, one morning. He had his head propped on Keith’s bare chest, trailing his fingers along Keith’s toned stomach. “Like,” he sat up, to look Keith in the eyes, “you’re my boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, chuckling a little. His voice was a little gravelly, he’d just brushed his teeth but it didn’t help the fact that they hadn’t got much sleeping done last night. “Of course. Boyfriends, partners, comrades. Whatever you want to call it. I’m yours.”

“Boyfriends,” Lance said decisively. If they went around calling themselves partners, their family and friends may assume nothing had shifted in their relationship. 

They were making breakfast later, if it could be called that. Brunch possibly, or maybe an early dinner. What mattered was they were frying eggs and Lance was chopping potatoes, when Keith said, “I love you.”

Lance looked over and Keith was staring down at the pan of eggs. He was red to the tips of his ears and wearing Lance’s frilliest apron. 

“Keith,” Lance said harshly. “Really? We finally got our act together.”

Then he tackled Keith into his kitchen cabinets in a furious kiss. 

Their eggs were both overdone and runny. Their potatoes were never cooked. Lance whispered ‘I love you too’ into the crook of Keith’s neck at four in the morning.

+

Lance was taking Kosmo for a walk, when Keith got the call. By the time Lance got back, Keith was almost entirely packed. 

Keith hadn’t officially moved into the bunkhouse. They’d only been at this for three weeks and most of those had been in bed, or on the farm, or tucked on Keith’s hoverbike in the middle of a dusty plain. Lance hadn’t realized how few things Keith really had there, until they all fit perfectly in a canvas duffel at the foot of Lance’s bed. 

“What’s this?” Lance asked. He was sweaty from the walk and groggy from the midday sun, but the sight of Keith packing sent him straight into high alert.

“The Blade called me in,” Keith said, folding a Garrison t-shirt that Lance was pretty percent sure wasn’t his. “There’s a mission in the Varga sector and they need me.”

“A mission?” Lance asked.

“It’s undercover, two to four weeks, I’ll call when I can but most of it may be radio silent,” Keith said. He finally looked up at Lance. “Do you know where my combat boots are? I can’t find them anywhere.”

“You’re going on a mission,” Lance said, flatly.

“Yeah?” Keith said, this time when he looked at Lance he really seemed to look at him. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Lance said. “I didn’t know you were still doing that.”

“Well I’ve been on leave,” Keith said slowly. “But it’s been over seven months, they need me.”

“I just⸺ thought we were retired,” Lance said.

“ _You’re_ retired,” Keith said. It was said forcefully, but without anger. Keith’s eyebrows were wiggling, it was clear he was trying not to commit to an emotion just yet. “Lance, what is this about?”

“I don’t want you to go,” Lance said. He didn’t even know he was going to say it, until he did. But as the words left his mouth they felt right. He didn’t want Keith to leave, he wanted him to stay here, on the farm, in the bunkhouse, with Lance, as long as they could. He didn’t want to sit up at odd hours for weeks on end wondering if Keith was alive. He didn’t want to have a boyfriend in theory. 

Sometimes he could still feel Allura’s fingers pressing into his cheeks, one last time. He didn’t want to be haunted by Keith too.

“But it’s my job,” Keith said, not getting it. 

“Quit,” Lance said, flinging his arms out, raising his voice. It was maddening all of the sudden, how gentle Keith was trying to be with him, when all Lance wanted to do was hit something. “Tell them to fuck off, move in with me.”

“I can’t just quit, Lance. I have a responsibility⸺”

“Fuck responsibility! We don’t owe anyone anything anymore!”

“Maybe you don’t, but I do.”

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t have to fight anymore, if that’s what you want,” Keith said. He looked so tired, like Lance had sucked all of the oxygen out of the room. “You gave up enough.” He looked at Lance like Allura was actually in the room, standing between them. They’d once been separated by an interdimensional space whale, but they’d never been further apart than this exact moment. “We all know you have. But I still have something to prove.”

“Prove it here, then,” Lance said. “Prove it to me, here. You don’t have to leave.”

Keith was quiet for a moment, staring at their feet. It felt like ages before he reached over and slung his duffel over his shoulder. “I do,” he said. 

“Is that your answer then?” Lance said.

“Lance⸺”

“Are you staying or going?” Lance asked. 

Keith searched his face, fingers tightening on his duffel strap. They’d been living in a bubble here, a moment in time and space that couldn’t have ever lasted. Lance should have known it couldn’t have lasted. 

He didn’t even need to hear Keith’s answer, to know what it was. 

Keith brushed past him to get through the door. 

Afterwards, Lance went to bed at eight and woke up to the sunrise. Rinse and repeat.


	2. Part 1

After Lance told him, Hunk stared at Lance like he’d never seen him before.

“You and Keith dated? For three weeks? You were boyfriends?” Hunk said. 

“Yes,” Lance said, annoyed. 

Hunk sounded very confused considering the extremely clear story Lance had just told him. Lance and Keith had dated for three weeks, then they broke up. The end.

“Oh boy,” Hunk said, putting his fork down. Hunk putting his fork down was serious business, they were eating Lance’s family’s famous picadillo, no one put their fork down in the middle of that. Especially  _ Hunk _ .

“It’s not a big deal,” Lance said. 

“It’s not⸺ Lance, you’ve been in love with him since we were fifteen.”

“I have not!” Lance said, putting his fork down. Fine, they were disagreeing about this.

“You used to stare at him every time he was in the same room. You left him notes in his locker.”

“I was glaring and those were declarations of war. I was menacing him. We were rivals.”

“Then why were they written on pink stationery?”

“I⸺ Hunk, what was I supposed to write them on? Yellow notepad paper? I’m not an animal.”

Hunk stared at him for a disturbing long time.

“What?” Lance insisted.

Hunk sighed. “I don’t know, man. I guess I just thought if you ever actually dated you would be it for each other. Like you’d get married and have twelve space wolf puppies and live happy ever after. We used to bet on it, on Voltron.”

“You what?!” Lance shrieked.

“Oh yeah, even Allura got in it at one point. But I think she got bored after Keith went off on the space whale,” Hunk said, pointedly looking away.

Sometimes Lance’s friends brought Allura up so deliberately, Lance knew it was just to see if he’d crack. Like every mention of her name was another hairline fracture and eventually the whole wall he’d constructed inside of himself would crumble when someone so much as mentioned how she liked her space goo. Well, they were in for a nasty surprise because Lance had built that wall out of vibranium.

“Anyways,” Hunk said, interrupting Lance’s musings. “I guess I shouldn’t be shocked, it is you and Keith.” He picked up his fork and they got back to eating for awhile, until Hunk said, “Was it good at least? While it lasted?”

“Sure,” Lance said, stabbing a potato. “I guess it was.”

+

Hunk had come to town for Lance’s birthday and stayed until mid-August. His last weekend in town he begged Lance to go out with him. When they’d been cadets, they’d been too young to fool anyone into letting them into the two and a half clubs in the small town near the Garrison. Lance had lived with his family on their farm an hour away from town for nearly a year now and he’d still never bothered trying them out. 

It was odd enough for Hunk to beg him to go out dancing, not stay in and make artisanal popcorn and watch old movies, that Lance agreed before he really knew what he was agreeing to. That’s how Lance ended up outside a club in his hot pants at nine on a Thursday.

The club was weirdly busy and there was a line down the block, but Hunk waved him past the line and the bouncer let them inside without any fuss. Lance was suspicious. 

Which was why when Hunk led him to a packed corner and everyone turned and shouted “Surprise” right in Lance’s face, he wasn’t surprised at all. Shiro came forward and folded Lance into a hug that Lance relaxed into, before Pidge tackled him from behind. 

“Happy belated birthday number four,” Coran said, clapping a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “Apologies that none of us were remotely near this quadrant during the actual day of your birth.”

“Thanks Coran,” Lance said.

“Yeah we’re sorry we’ve missed your dulcet tones while we traversed the galaxy,” Pidge said into his shoulder. 

“You should be sorry,” Lance said, ruffling her hair. It was growing longer and it stuck up at odd angles when he released her. “How have you survived the past couple months without my sublime commentary?”

“It’s a real mystery,” Pidge said. She then launched into a description of a colony on one of New Altea’s moons that used dirt as fuel. 

During this time, Lance attempted to casually scan the room. His family was scattered around, Veronica was chatting up Acxa which was appalling. There were some friends and acquaintances from the Garrison and the farm. Strangely Slav was there, harassing Shiro by the bar. 

No overgrown mullet. No Keith. Not that Lance expected him to be here. Not only had he just rejoined the Blade, but they’d just broken up. Lance didn’t have a right to Keith anymore. Which felt odd and wrong. Just because they’d dated for a few weeks and it didn’t work out, it undid years of rivalry and friendship. They’d saved the world together, but now they were strangers. 

Keith was a part of him. Just like all of the paladins. They had spent years of their lives juggling the responsibilities of operating one body. Sometimes when one of them moved throughout a room the others would follow, satellites released from their orbits but still circling each other out of habit and comfort. It felt strange to be in a room without any of them, even after everything. The fact that he’d be in almost every room without Keith from now on hadn’t really hit him yet. 

Lance meandered from group to group. Thanking people for coming, getting an embarrassing amount of noogies and kisses from various family and Voltron alliance members. 

He was wandering back to the bar to replace the martini Hunk had fetched for him when they’d arrived, when a hand curled over his shoulder. He had a moment of relief, finally, Keith was here, they could make it through this. But when he turned it wasn’t a familiar crooked grin that greeted him.

It was Kyle Klune. Lance grimaced. Okay. So. This was one of the reasons Lance wouldn’t have minded staying in space if it had come to that. Nothing worse than seeing an ex in a bar on your birthday. 

“If it isn’t Lance McClain,” Kyle said. His mouth stretched in what he probably thought was a smile, but looked more like a shark opening his mouth for the kill. “It’s been too long.”

“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” Lance said. 

“No kidding!” Kyle exclaimed. “When I saw the news, the giant space man, I was like whoa! That was my first boyfriend!”

“I was your first boyfriend?” Lance asked.

“Uh, well, close enough,” Kyle said, slapping Lance’s shoulder a few more times. “So how’s it been, man? Still running around on giant robots?”

“Actually⸺” 

“I’ve been working my way up the ladder at the Garrison. I’m an executive Cargo pilot, basically their leader. They’ve been talking about giving me a medal or two for exemplary hauling. You know⸺”

Lance subtly looked around, trying to gauge if he had a friend nearby to rescue him. But Kyle’s stupid shoulder was blocking half his view. He had no choice but to awkwardly smile up at the guy, not flinch at the hand still grasping his collarbone, and hope Hunk saw exactly who had cornered him and swooped in. Any moment now.

“⸺and that’s when I said, no need to give me an eternal medal of valor, you guys. I was only doing my job. Hey,” Kyle paused and leaned towards Lance’s face. “Did you get face tats while you were in space? That’s sick.”

He reached towards them and Lance barely had time to flinch back before a hand shot out and stopped Kyle in his tracks. Lance was just about to thank all the worlds for Hunk, when he noticed the hand had a fingerless glove on and it was attached to a surly looking Keith.

“Did he say you could touch his face?” Keith demanded.

“Who the fuck are you?” Kyle demanded right back, yanking his hand from Keith’s grip. 

Keith subtly moved in front of Lance, but not before making sheepish eye contact with him. 

“I’m his boyfriend and I think you’d better move along,” Keith said.

Kyle clearly had never been told ‘no’ in his entire life. It was why Lance had had to convince Kyle he was the one that wanted to break up with Lance, back at the Garrison. But after weighing the choices of screaming at Keith and Lance in the middle of a crowded bar during the birthday party of one of the people he’d be screaming at, Kyle seemed to determine that he was better off brag flirting with someone else that night. He stomped off, but not before making significant distasteful eye contact with Lance. 

For a moment Lance was fifteen again, dating this loser, and Kyle was dragging him through the dirt to break up with him. 

“Hey,” Keith said. “You want some air?”

Lance nodded, he didn’t look up at Keith for fear that he would know exactly what he was reliving. Keith didn’t seem to mind, he put a hand around Lance’s elbow and led him towards the back door. There was an alley, lined with trash cans, weeds, and stars. Lance looked up and tried to figure out where he was in the universe. 

Keith was quiet beside him. After awhile he took out his knife and started absentmindedly playing with it with one hand. This was such an old gesture that Lance could feel his shoulders relaxing. It was just Keith. No matter what had happened between them. It was always just Keith.

“Boyfriend, huh?” Lance teased.

Keith immediately flushed red. “Sorry. I didn’t think he’d go away if I was just a friend.”

Somewhere in the distance a coyote howled and the club vibrated against the wall behind him. A star above them twinkled and then went out, streaking across the sky. 

“You were never just a friend, Keith,” Lance said. 

Keith let out a long breath. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” Lance deflected. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” Keith said, fiddling with something in his pocket. He hesitated and then tossed it to Lance. A small box with a bow on it. “Happy birthday.”

Lance tore the wrapping paper to shreds, getting the box open. Keith laughed at him, gathering all the little pieces, so they wouldn’t become litter. Inside the box was a small clear container with half a dozen seeds inside. 

“I saw them on my last mission, they kind of look like sunflowers,” Keith said. “I thought you should have them for your garden.”

“Thanks,” Lance said, he closed up the box again. “I⸺ Keith, I⸺”

“Me too,” Keith said, he turned and laced their fingers together and something about that sent a desperate thrill through Lance’s sternum. Like a peal of lightning on a clear day. 

“Are you going to be around for awhile?” Lance asked.

Keith winced, he pulled his hand away. He stared at a spot on the wall across from them. 

“I leave in two days for an open ended mission. I don’t know if⸺ Lance!”

Without really thinking about it, Lance was already walking away from him. He opened the door to the club and the thumping music filled the alley. Almost drowning out Keith, who was saying, “Why are you being like this? Why do you keep shutting me out?”

Lance let the door stand open, but turned to look at Keith. He didn’t know what he’d thought. That they could go back to normal so easily? No, that maybe Keith would go away for a few weeks and realize what he’d wanted all along was to stay behind with Lance. That wasn’t Keith. And that wasn’t Lance.

Something needed to change, they couldn’t keep doing this.

“Be safe out there,” Lance said. 

The door closed behind him with a thump, he was immediately surrounded by the music and cheerful laughter from the bar. If he concentrated hard enough, it was almost like he’d left Keith behind in another time. He didn’t see him again the entire night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter on friday! hope you enjoyed! :)


	3. Part 2

“You’d be doing me a huge favor, Shiro said,” Lance muttered to himself. “I love you and appreciate you, Lance. You’re the best looking paladin Voltron has ever had, Shiro said.”

“I don’t recall using those exact words,” Shiro said, from right behind him.

Lance screamed a little and turned to find Shiro watching him with blatant amusement.

They were on the boarding plank of the Atlas. Lance had been invited by Shiro last week, although ‘invited’ was a nice way to say ‘coerced.’ Shiro may not have so obviously stroked Lance’s ego, but Lance had only realized after Veronica had dropped him off at the foot of the Atlas that Shiro had clearly appealed to Lance’s vanity somehow. Why else would he have agreed to finalizing the Atlas’ outreach program plans with the entire crew of the Atlas and Shiro, when he could be weeding in his new greenhouse.

“That’s what I heard,” Lance said, haughtily. 

“Ah, well, in that case, glad it got you here,” Shiro said, throwing an arm around Lance’s shoulders and leading him up the rest of the boarding plank. 

Lance considered panicking. He hadn’t been aboard a ship of any kind since he’d returned to Earth, but at the exact same time Lance realized that Shiro seemed to realize that. He distracted him as he led him down the stark corridors by gossiping about his latest date with Curtis. Things were getting serious apparently, Curtis basically lived at Shiro’s house. How soon was too soon to give someone a key? Lance, personally, thought if Shiro eloped tomorrow, he deserved it, and Curtis would happily go along. He just better invite Lance to the after party.

Before Lance knew it, they were entering the control room. Team Voltron 2.0 were scattered about. James Griffin was having a hand wavy argument with Rizavi near the windows and the others were, shockingly, actually doing their jobs. At the captain's chair, Kinkade was waiting for them. He turned to greet them as they approached and his smile sent sparks shooting down Lance’s spine.

He hadn’t seen Kinkade since after, well. Since they’d dated briefly a month ago. They’d only been on a few dates before realizing they were better off friends, but it still kind of rankled, seeing him there. Perfect smile and perfect shoulders. After his birthday, Lance had tried to make a habit of going out once every couple weeks. It helped to throw his routine off a little, when no one was there to do it for him.

His therapist had also approved of him being social outside of his family and practically shoved him into tight pants and a fishnet crop top. Which, coincidentally, was basically what he was wearing the night he’d caught Kinkade’s eye across the bar. He still maintains that he went on the first date with Kinkade because he couldn’t believe someone so attractive was so attracted to him. Then additional dates because Kinkade was funny and sweet. Then no dates at all because sometimes Lance would wake up in bed with Kinkade, eyes still closed, and he’d expect Keith to be lying next to him when he opened them. And that wasn’t fair to anybody.

Kinkade had been understanding. Too understanding. Lance still couldn’t wrap his mind around how someone like Kinkade could be hung up on someone like James Griffin, but they all had their faults.

Kinkade inclined his head as they approached. He still wasn’t very chatty in front of more than one person, but Lance didn’t need to hear him speak to understand that Kinkade was happy to see him. 

Lance pulled him into a hug, slapping him on the back a couple times, sparking a laugh from the man. 

“Good to see you,” Lance said.

Kinkade nodded again. “Thanks for offering your advice today.”

“Oh, not a problem, I love telling people what to do on peace tours of the outer reaches of space,” Lance said.

“Then why haven’t you come to this meeting in 79 percent of other universes?” a voice babbled behind him. 

Lance turned to find Slav frantically tapping at a data pad, all of his legs moving at once.

“Slav, buddy, no one told me you’d be here,” Lance said, turning to raise an eyebrow at Shiro.

Shiro, who normally lost all composure within seconds of Slav appearing, seemed to be doing some kind of calming breathing technique.

“Slav is joining us for our peace mission, to ‘prevent the end of the universe as we know it,’” Shiro said. “Apparently there are several universe ending inciting incidents on our tour.”

“The universes where the Blue Paladin helps plan our tour both decrease the chances that the entire universe will implode and increase our chances for the cause of implosion being faster and less painful than others. So we value your opinion.” Slav relayed.

“Uh, no problemo,” Lance said.

“It would improve our chances of survival even further if the Red Paladin would arrive in the next 38 seconds,” Slav said.

“The Red⸺” Lance started. He felt a commiserating hand clap his shoulder a couple times, Kinkade, and turned to find Kinkade and Shiro watching him with the kind of sympathy that could only be warranted by a set-up.

“Sorry,” Shiro said. “I know there’s something going on there, but we needed both of you.”

“Shiro, you will be the first man in the universe to experience death for the third time,” Lance promised, just as the doors to the control deck whooshed open to reveal Keith.

Keith looked good. He was wearing his standard Blade uniform and it was very obvious how much he’d bulked up since Lance had seen him last. Lance almost couldn’t believe there had been a time he’d been even fractionally taller than the broad shouldered man Keith had become. He may have swooned if he didn’t have a modicum of pride. Keith’s hair had grown longer too and he had it tied back from his face in a long braid. Lance narrowed his eyes. 

Keith didn’t know how to braid.

“Keith! Thanks for joining us,” Shiro said. Clearly trying to dispel the awkward air. 

Keith, who was very sensitive to the mood of the room even in adulthood, had clearly been able to tell that a fight was brewing. He approached them warily and with a hunch to his shoulders. 

“Shiro,” he said. “Lance.” Keith met Lance’s eyes for only a moment before staring at where Kinkade’s hand was still on Lance’s shoulder, then, “Kinkade.”

“Now that we’re all here, why don’t we take this to the conference room?” Shiro said, he stepped forward and took Keith by the shoulder, leading him towards a door on the other side of the room.

“You couldn’t have warned me?” Lance asked Kinkade once they were out of earshot.

Kinkade wrapped an arm around his shoulders, ushering him as Shiro was ushering Keith.

“Would you have come?” Kinkade asked.

Lance let out a gusty sigh and didn’t deign to respond. As they passed Griffin, where he was still arguing with Rizavi, Lance noticed Griffin’s eyes get caught on where Lance and Kinkade were touching, before he turned to look out the window with a childlike huff. Lance smiled and threw an arm around Kinkade’s waist. At least one of them could benefit from this visit.

The meeting lasted what felt like days, but was only a few hours. Lance didn’t have much to add, Shiro and his new team had worked tirelessly on a tour that would include many neglected planets and peoples, it was thorough and thoughtful. Lance only had to pipe in with his thoughts a few times, when Shiro’s team verged into the ridiculous.

“I understand that the above worlders and below worlders of this planet are at war,” Lance said. “And visiting one or the other first could indicate favoritism. I just don’t see why it's necessary to go through an elaborate scheme of seemingly meeting them both at the same time, when you could, actually, meet them both at the same time on neutral ground.”

“What neutral ground?” Griffin demanded.

God, why did Kinkade like this guy, Lance thought. Just as Keith jumped in as well, with, “The moon, Griffin.”

“Yeah, the moon Griffin,” Lance said. 

“That can’t possibly be a viable…” Griffin trailed off, seeing the contemplative look on Shiro’s face. “Really? Meeting both delegations on their planet’s moon is more appealing than splitting our team between their welcome galas and pretending Shiro is at both at the same time?”

“Yes,” Curtis said. “Griffin. What kind of harlequin novels have you been reading? First you suggest seducing an Altean diplomat, now this.”

Griffin mulishly crossed his arms over his chest. 

Once the negotiations were over, Lance meandered towards the viewing deck. He hadn’t spent much time on the Atlas, but he could never get over how huge it was. From the viewing deck, he could see not only where his house was supposed to be, but half the state. The ocean glittered just over the horizon and Lance felt a pang of homesickness for Cuba.

He was glad his family had all made it to the Garrison safely during the war. They had a beautiful new home here and a thriving business, but just knowing the house he grew up in was likely rubble somewhere left a ragged hole inside of him. 

Sometimes if he concentrated he could smell the kitchen of their old house, he could walk from room to room feeling the indentations in the wall paper, the cold uneven tiles on the floor. If he walked into the yard, he could still climb the wall that lined their garden, skipping over the brittle stones and shells that hurt his feet. There was a path off the road that led straight to the beach and in his mind’s eye he could navigate the windy trail and come out to the ocean. He’d walk straight down until the water lapped at his knees.

And then he’d blink and he was back on the viewing deck of the Atlas, cooling coffee in hand.

“Oh. Hey,” Keith said. Lance hadn’t heard him coming in behind him. His hands at his sides were fidgeting with his belt. He looked caught off-guard, which was a sign he hadn’t followed Lance in here on purpose. Lance didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about that, so he settled on annoyed.

“Hey,” Lance said, taking a pointed sip of his coffee. He kept his gaze on the ocean as Keith came to stand closer to him. “Nice braid.”

“Oh, thanks,” Keith said. “Zethrid did it for me.”

Lance couldn’t remember exactly which of Acxa’s friends Zethrid was, but he hoped Keith had a real nice time with his Blade girlfriend braiding his hair. One day they’d probably get married and have half a dozen Galran chicklets and Zethrid would braid all of their hair the same and they’d take tacky family photos to mail to their friends and family on holidays.

“How have you been?” Keith asked, a little stilted. 

How had he been? He’d been making slow and steady progress on his mental health over the course of several months of therapy, he'd barely done anything at all. Meanwhile Keith had been out saving the galaxy for the umpteenth time and also had enough spare energy to get a girlfriend. 

“I’m dandy, Keith. How are you?”

“Are you mad at me?” Keith asked, seeming to shake off his wariness at the prospect of an argument.

“Not any more than usual,” Lance said.

“Okay, then how are things with Kinkade?” Keith asked.

Lance turned to look Keith in the eye, incredulous. “Don’t drag Kinkade into this!”

“Why not?” Keith asked. “Shiro said you dated awhile back but I didn’t think⸺” Keith had his arms crossed and his eyes on the floor at this point. He’d reigned in a lot of his anger over the years Lance had known him, in order to be a good paladin, a good leader. But he’d never quite been able to reign all of his emotions in when it came down to Lance. 

“Are you going to break up with him when he goes off to space, or is it just me you wanted gone?”

Lance was so thrown by this question that he didn’t even bother to correct Keith about his and Kinkade’s relationship. “ _ We _ broke up, Keith!” he practically shouted. “ _ We _ made a decision and now we’re broken up.”

“You made a decision,” Keith said.

“No, you still had something to prove,” Lance said. “I gave you a choice and you didn’t choose me.”

For some reason, he shoved his half-full, cold coffee into Keith’s hands and then stomped to the doors. They slid open, revealing an empty hall that led either deeper into the bowels of the ship or back outside, to his farm, away from whatever Keith was accusing him of.

He turned to Keith one last time. Keith was holding his coffee, it had splattered a little on his uniform, he looked like Lance had slapped him in the face.

“Maybe we just weren’t meant to be,” Lance said. 

The worst part was, in that moment, he really believed it to be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i PROMISE it gets better in the next chapter!! next chapter early next week, please comment or leave kudos if you enjoyed! ;)


	4. Part 3

Lance was at the farmer’s market when Hunk found him.

Lance called it the farmer’s market, but what it really was was an intergalactic trading post in a crater on Earth’s moon that highly resembled a farmer’s market. In order to play the part, Lance was wearing a straw hat, sunglasses, and was sipping an iced tea, while he peddled off various fruits, vegetables, and Rachel’s organic shampoo line. 

His therapist had thought it would be a good way for him to get out of the house, meet new people, and baby step his way into space again. 

Lance had told her he didn’t see the need to ever go to space again and she’d fixed him with this knowing look, that was beginning to seriously annoy. So here he was on a Saturday morning, explaining to a Bii-Boh-Bi looking alien that the price of his cabbages were not for negotiation. When Hunk came strolling up.

Lance immediately threw himself into Hunk’s arms. 

“Buddy!” Lance exclaimed. “I thought you were, like, five billion light years from here. What is up?”

Hunk laughed and spun him around a couple times before setting him down again. The Bii-Boh-Bi stomped away with a huff.

“I volunteered to come get you,” Hunk said. He sounded like he was being incredibly careful about his wording.

“Come get me for what?” Lance asked, hands on his hips. “If this is another tasting for Shiro’s wedding, I absolutely refuse. I cannot eat anymore of Shiro’s attempts to make Curtis’s grandmother’s fourth cousins' family recipes. My intestines are rotting. Shiro is pretty but a chef he is not.”

“Ha ha,” Hunk said. That was it: ha ha. No actual laughter, just a strange attempt to convince Lance that he found his plight funny. Suspicious.

“Whatever this is, I refuse,” Lance said, to be safe.

“What? I haven’t even told you yet!” Hunk said.

“You showed up on the moon, while I’m working and vulnerable, and you’ve barely laughed at my jokes,” Lance said. “Is Zarkon back?”

“What? No!” Hunk said. Then he sighed like the weight of the world was on his shoulders, and said, “So it's Keith’s birthday this weekend.”

“Yes, I know when Keith’s birthday is,” Lance said.

“Shiro wants us to kidnap him and take him out to celebrate.”

“What do you mean, kidnap?”

“He may be technically on an undercover Marmora mission, at the moment.”

“Oh,” Lance said. “So you want me to go to space, interrupt a dangerous undercover mission, potentially blowing Keith’s cover, to rendezvous with Shiro who is also on a mission, in order to celebrate Keith’s birthday. And I’m assuming they sent you, because you have the highest chance of getting me to say yes?”

“Basically,” Hunk said.

“Cool, well, that’s definitely a ‘no’.”

Which is how Lance found himself on the Holt family spaceship, hurtling away from Earth at the speed of light. 

“Lance, stop pouting at Rover. They don’t deserve it,” Pidge said from the driver’s seat. 

“Are we there yet?” Lance asked. While he was distracted Rover took the opportunity to skitter towards the back of the ship, traitor.

“We just left, bud,” Hunk said.

“I feel like none of you have taken my feelings into consideration on this trip,” Lance said. “The last time I was this far into space was very traumatic for me.”

“Yes, we know Lance,” Pidge said. “Unfortunately if we show up on a Blade of Marmora mission attempting to kidnap Keith, the chances of him willingly going along with it if you aren’t there to distract him with your strange angry mating rituals are slim to none.”

“Yes, but consider this: Keith and I aren’t a thing anymore. Not even a playfully arguing over the other’s intelligence kind of thing. We’ve dissolved every aspect of our former relationship. He may even not remember what I look like.”

“Highly doubtful,” Pidge said, laughing meanly. “Keith spends half his time awake staring at you. If someone was like, hey Keith draw two things from memory they would probably be a knife and your dumb face.”

Lance blew out a breath and tried to make it seem more vexed and less stressed about hurtling through space on an alien spaceship. 

“Just what has got your panties in a twist, bro?” Pidge asked, twisting around in her pilot’s chair just to raise an eyebrow at him.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Lance said.

“They broke up,” Hunk said.

“They  _ what _ .”

“Hunk!”

“They got together at Shiro’s party like four months ago, dated for a couple weeks and then,” Hunk mimed an explosion with his hands.

“Lance! You have just lost me two hundred dollars,” Pidge groaned.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he muttered.

There was silence for a few moments before Pidge cleared her throat. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she said. “If you want, I can actually turn this ship around. I didn’t intend to kidnap two of my best friends this weekend.”

Lance blew out another breath and this one actually released some tension from his shoulders. It was one thing to tease and bitch and annoy the hell out of each other. It was another to actually make Pidge feel bad about something that wasn’t her fault. 

“No, it's fine,” Lance said. “At least I’ll get to make Keith as miserable as I am on his own birthday.”

“That’s the spirit!” Pidge said, whirling around to drive properly. 

They rendezvoused with the Atlas near the small planet they’d be dragging Keith to later that day. Then all the original paladins, sans Keith, headed out to a cluster of moons that were at war with each other. 

Apparently Keith was undercover in the rebellion of a moon at the outer edge of the cluster, attempting to gain intel on what or who had started the war to begin with. By night he spied on different rebel factions, participated in rebel potlucks, and generally made a nuisance of himself throughout the city so the rebels would have incentive to be constantly active. Therefore possibly spilling more information. By day, though, Keith’s cover was basically a high school gym teacher. 

It was incredible.

Lance watched from across the street, through the scope of his rifle as Keith, in the shortest red shorts Lance had ever seen, instructed a gaggle of middle school-aged green aliens on how to play what looked like soccer, but was played with a giant orange decagon. Keith looked good, obviously. Lance couldn’t think of a time where he’d seen Keith and hadn’t thought he looked good, but right now he looked so good Lance wanted to kick him in his pale unguarded shins and run away. He wondered if Keith was still with Zethrid.

Hunk, dressed as janitorial staff with a huge hat pulled low over his face, wandered into the vicinity behind Keith. He was pushing along a cart with a trash can and various glowing cleaning supplies. Keith’s shift for the day was almost over and as the children punted each other to the ground with their giant decagon the clock ran out and the school bell rang. 

A cheer went up among the kids as they ran back towards the school building, leaving Keith behind to clean after them. Hunk shifted closer to Keith after the kids were all inside. Keith, distracted, didn’t notice Hunk coming up behind him. Hunk must have whispered something because Keith’s shoulders tightened. From behind it looked like he was bracing himself for an attack.

Then Hunk leaned closer and whispered something that made Keith furtively check his surroundings and then dive straight into Hunk’s trash can. 

Lance nearly took an eye out laughing at the view through his scope. 

“Mullet is in the net, I repeat, Mullet is in the net,” Lance reported. 

“I’m right here, Lance,” Pidge said from over his shoulder.

“You’re ruining the essence of covert ops,” Lance said, removing his rifle from its stand. They bantered back and forth a bit as he packed his gear away. It helped ease his nerves in a way he was certain Pidge was aware of. 

By the time they were leaving the apartment building they’d been squatting in, they were jostling each other on their way to the stairwell. Their ship was parked on the roof, under cloaking tech, with Shiro waiting impatiently inside. They had six floors to climb to get to him, but they barely made it up one of those before the stairwell door on the ground floor slammed open. 

“Keith, wait—” Hunk said.

Lance and Pidge glanced at each other and then over the railing. They almost missed Keith’s ponytail as it whipped around a corner and he started jogging up the stairs. 

“Do not run up these stairs! Keith!” Hunk said, groaning, before seeming to follow after him.

“Brief me as we walk,” Keith said.

“Walk?”

“Where was his last known location? Do we have any leads? Has someone hacked into his phone?”

The acoustics in this stairwell were really wild, Lance could hear both of their voices echoing so loudly the entire building could probably hear them. Lance signalled to Pidge to wait in the shadowy corner of their floor, maybe they could scare the shit out of Keith long enough to give Hunk a breather. Nobody should have to run up twelve flights of stairs, just because Keith Kogane was half Galra and half American Ninja Warrior.

“No, no, and no,” Hunk responded.

“No? We don’t have anything?” Keith demanded, seeming to pick up his pace. “How long has he been missing? In the time it took you to extract me, someone must have been pursuing a lead.”

“Why are you both like this? You were made for each other,” Hunk said.

Their voices were getting closer now, Lance braced himself to surprise them. Keith came sprinting around the corner, Hunk close on his heels, griping at each other about something or other. Probably whatever Hunk had said to get Keith to jump in a trash can on his birthday.

Just as Keith was turning to look back and most likely to give Hunk even more of a hard time, Lance jumped from where he’d been hiding. 

“Surprise!” he exclaimed, trying desperately not to feel awkward that the last time they’d seen each other they’d been in a screaming match on the Atlas. It was Keith’s birthday, he could play nice.

“Lance?” Keith said, eyes widening, backing away from him. The run up the stairs seemed to be catching up with him, he looked sweaty and dizzy.

“What? Not a very good surprise?” Lance asked. He looked to Pidge, who was watching the proceedings with a suspiciously amused air. “I know it wasn’t my best, but I don’t think it—”

He was cut off by Keith leaning forward and wrapping his gross, sweaty arms around him. 

“Ew! Keith! You smell like a locker room,” Lance said, but did his best to pat him on the back. He summoned old-Lance from the depths of himself, the Lance who hadn’t seen this man naked. The Lance who hadn’t watched Allura sacrifice herself for the universe. The Lance who threw himself into the action with calculated but enthusiastic abandon. And then he pushed Keith away, while starting in on what was sure to be a worn out locker room joke, but Keith startled the joke right out of him by placing both hands on his face.

“Are you okay?” Keith asked.

“Yeah? Yes, I am,” Lance said. “You know me, just here for the party.”

Keith narrowed his eyes at him and then turned to stare down Hunk without removing his hands from Lance’s person.

Hunk was waving his hands around. “It was honestly the only thing I could think of to make you come with me.”

“What was?” Lance asked.

“Yeah, Hunk, what could you possibly have told Keith?” Pidge asked, her voice turning distinctly annoying as she pushed her glasses up her nose. 

“Nothing,” Keith said quickly, his voice cracking. Lance hadn’t heard his voice crack in years, not since he’d returned from his space whale several inches taller. 

He pulled away from Lance and retreated towards the stairs, looking like he may bolt down them at any moment. His arms were crossed and his face mulish and with his voice having just cracked, Lance felt like they’d been joined by the sweaty isolated teenager that had driven them away from an armed Garrison squadron on the back of a hoverbike. Not the man he’d grown into. 

“Why did you come here?” Keith asked, pointedly not looking at Lance.

“It’s your birthday dude,” Lance said.

Out of everything that had happened the past few minutes that was the thing that had Keith looking the most surprised.

“Are you sure?” Keith asked, staring perplexed at the ground.

“Are we sure? Dude! Do you not have a calendar on this planet?” Lance asked.

“They don’t have calendars here, the weeks and months or whatever happen whenever the queen decides they do.”

“Wow, monarchism is a beast,” Hunk said. 

“Anyways, we were going to kidnap you and take you to Space Ball to celebrate,” Pidge said, “if you want.”

“Don’t you mean, Space Mall?” Keith asked.

“No, Space Ball,” Lance said, starting up the next flight of stairs. “Get with the times Keith, keep up with the kids. It’s the next big, space thing.” He paused on his ascent and looked back at Keith, where he was still standing stubbornly by the descending stairs. “We can just go by ourselves, if you’re too busy playing dodgeball.”

“I’m not busy!” Keith said, pushing past Lance up the stairs. “I love space balls!”

“Can you repeat that?” Lance asked, heckling Keith as they started a quick pace up the stairs again. 

“Shut up, Lance!” Keith said, blushing. 

Hunk said something to Pidge from several strides behind them and Pidge chuckled. 

“I don’t know, man. You’re the one that missed them being together,” Pidge said. 

Lance pushed Keith into the railing and called him a loser and hoped Keith hadn’t put much stock into what their friends were saying. 

+

They were at Space Ball for a pleasant several hours before Shiro had six Vrepit Ale shots in a row and ended up sprawled across the bar. He talked about Curtis’s shoulders for thirty minutes and then started crying when Hunk mentioned Curtis was engaged to someone. Even though Shiro was the one he was engaged to.

Lance kept Shiro company until Pidge decided to call it a night and took Shiro with her to the ship. 

Then Lance watched from the bar as Hunk led Keith in a dance on the other side of the room. Keith kept stepping on Hunk’s feet, but they were both laughing. In an ill-planned move, Hunk tried to dip Keith and nearly dropped him in the punch bowl. It was as Hunk was dipping Keith down that Lance noticed Rolo and Nyma dancing behind them. 

He nearly brained himself diving behind the bar. 

“Hey kid, you can’t be back here,” the bartender said, not even sparing him a glance as they continued mixing a Lyrian cocktail.

“Three of my exes are out on that dance floor and only one of them probably won’t steal my ship keys by the end of the night,” Lance said, batting his eyelashes up at the unaffected bartender. “Can I please just lay here on this grimy floor until I am drunk enough not to regret my many indiscretions?”

The bartender looked down at him and raised what was maybe an eyebrow? They were blue and had spikes instead of hair. 

“Absolutely not kid, I wouldn’t let you block my ice machine if you were a paladin of Voltron.”

“Woo boy,” Lance said. “Look at the time.”

He stood, knocked back the closest shot on the counter, dropped some credits in the tip jar and launched himself straight into the fray. He’d gone only a few feet before he walked straight into Keith. 

“There you are,” Keith said, his voice rumbling through his broad chest. 

Lance had his hands on his shoulders, for some reason. He squeezed. 

“Okay, how much have you had?” Keith asked. “Where’s Shiro?” 

“Pidge took him back,” Lance said. “Did you get taller?”

“You’re shrinking,” Keith said, “Oh.”

Lance felt Keith’s arm going around his shoulders, holding him upright. His knees felt wobbly and his tongue felt heavy. 

“He’s probably fine,” Keith was saying, “but I’ll take him back to the ship.”

Hunk was brushing Lance’s hair out of his eyes and smiling a small smile. Over his shoulder were a couple people Lance recognized, Hunk must have ran into friends. 

He and Keith talked a bit more and then Keith was leading Lance outside into the brisk evening air. A bouncer was sitting on a stool outside the building and didn’t even look up from their phone as Keith basically carried Lance across the lot to their ship. 

Shiro had parked across three parking spaces, like they were a school bus, and had justified himself by complaining how long it always took him to park at Space Mall. There was plenty of room to lean Lance against the side of the ship as Keith went inside and then returned with a bottle of water. 

Lance drank the water as the night air cleared his senses.

“We always end up talking outside bars,” Lance said.

“That was one time,” Keith said. “And we aren’t talking now.”

“No, but I want to be,” Lance said. 

Keith frowned at him and then at the sky. The stars were always much brighter on this side of the galaxy, but they’d never quite felt like home. 

“Do you mean right now or in general?”

“I miss you,” Lance said. “Sometimes I go to text you something and I remember I can’t and it feels like…” He bit his lip and tried to swallow down the feeling rising within him.

“What was the last thing you wanted to text me?” Keith asked.

Lance took out his phone and scrolled until he found a picture of the sunflowers Keith had given him on his birthday. They were sprouting rapidly in his greenhouse, towering over him and all his other plants. 

He tilted the screen towards Keith and Keith smiled. It was one of those smiles that always made Lance feel like he’d made Keith feel something he’d never felt before.

“I saw Rolo and Nyma in the club,” he blurted. 

Keith winced in sympathy. “Didn’t you…?”

“Yes,” Lance said miserably. “While you were on that space turtle. They were in the alliance. They were so suave! Again!”

“They didn’t steal the blue lion that time though, maybe they really liked you,” Keith said. 

“They tried to sneak Kaltenecker out the back door when they broke up with me,” Lance said.

Keith snorted, an inelegant sound that made Lance have to swat him on the shoulder several times. But it did not deter Keith from laughing at his pain. 

Lance felt a pinch of courage come over him.

“It’s too bad Zethrid couldn’t be here,” he said.

“Zethrid?” Keith asked, frowning. “Why would she?”

“Keith! Your girlfriend should be around on your birthday!”

Keith laughed at that for five solid minutes, every time he went to give a coherent response he would look up at Lance’s baffled face and start up again. Finally, he seemed to gather himself. He said, “Zethrid’s girlfriend would have a real problem if I was dating her. And besides, she’s not really my type.”

He nudged Lance’s shoulder and as they looked out over the stars, the club door opened across the parking lot and Hunk spilled into the evening air. He waved to them as he approached and they waved back. 

“Well, happy birthday you jerk,” Lance said. “Hope you got what you wanted.”

“I did,” Keith said, so automatically that Lance turned to look at him. 

Keith was still looking at the sky. His ears were red. “I got to see all of you. I missed you.”

“Yeah,” Lance said. He had a stupid present in the ship and a hangover to nurse tomorrow, but it felt like he had Keith again. Maybe not as a friend yet, but as a something. 

Something was better than nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next update will probably be thursday!! unless i forget!! thanks for reading! :D


	5. Part 4

“Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” 

Lance turned to find Veronica standing in the doorway of his greenhouse. She looked tired but amused in her Garrison uniform. The last time Lance had seen her had been weeks ago at Shiro’s house for dinner. She’d been away on a mission ever since. He reached over and hugged her, lifting her feet off the floor just enough to make her yell and swat at him.

“So? How goes space?” Lance asked, trying to seem casual. He continued pruning the sunflowers he’d been tending to as she tapped her foot on the ground. 

“Shiro’s wedding is in two hours,” she said.

“Yeah, two hours!” Lance said. “That’s plenty of time to get to his house.”

“Don’t you have a date? Aren’t you usually primping by now?” she accused. 

Lance frowned and put down his shears. He glanced over at the new Rose of Lyra bushes that were blooming several feet away. They were putting out large purple flowers that were supposed to have medicinal properties. Pidge was examining some of the blooms for him at her lab. Everyone was pretty shocked he’d even got the seeds to sprout, let alone bloom. They were supposed to be extinct. No Rose of Lyra seeds had found compatible soil in thousands of years. Lance touched the marks on his cheeks and then tried to play it off as rubbing some dirt away.

“You’re right, I should do a mask. My skin has been so dry from going in and out of the greenhouse every day.” He took off his apron and made his way towards the house, not looking back at his sister. She was stomping along behind him, clearly aggravated about something or other.

He didn’t see how he could have pissed her off from thousands of light years away.

Since Keith’s birthday, Lance had been texting him occasionally and Keith responded here and there. He was still on missions, still undercover a lot of the time, and there were sometimes weeks between Lance sending him something and Keith replying. Keith never reached out to him first. 

He wasn’t sure how to feel. He was on Earth and with his family and doing something he didn’t hate. But he was bored. So he’d started dating again and now Veronica was angry.

“What is it Veronica?” he asked, spinning around right before he reached his front door. 

She stopped short and put her hands on her hips.

“Who are you dating?” she asked, but it sounded more like a challenge.

The person she was probably angry about was a nice young woman named Farla. She’d come to their farm with the Rose of Lyra seeds several weeks ago and asked if they could figure out how to rear them. Her family had had the seeds for hundreds of years, but after the Galra had destroyed their planet they hadn’t been able to find soil that allowed them to germinate. Lance had figured it out, with some science, some praying, and a hint of quintessence. 

After that, Farla had asked him out to dinner and he’d asked her to a picnic and now they were going to Shiro’s wedding. 

“Why does it matter?” Lance asked.

“Because I was just on a mission with Keith for two weeks and he was miserable!” Veronica nearly shouted. “And now I’m going to this wedding with Acxa and he’s going to be sitting beside us all night sighing while he watches you flirt with some weird rebound. How am I supposed to get my girlfriend in the mood like that?”

“That sounds like a you problem,” Lance said, taking the opportunity to let himself into his house and lock her outside.

He could hear her muffled cursing even as he closed his bathroom door behind him, but he had bigger things to think about than his sister’s love life. 

+

Farla met him at Shiro’s house. She was wearing a long emerald green dress with a gold necklace and hoop earrings, all of which complimented her dark skin. Her hair was pinned back with small flowers and allowed her two antennae to hang gently over her forehead. From the moment Lance had first seen her, he’d known she was a beautiful person. He’d relearned that sentiment whenever they spent time together. She cared about her people, her family, her culture, and she’d only known Lance a few weeks but it was clear she cared about him as well. It had been a long time since Lance had met someone on his own who he clicked with so immediately. 

She smiled brightly when she saw him, bouncing a little on her heels. She was several inches taller than him, but he hadn’t been able to get a good grasp on her height until their second date, because she was always moving, bouncing, and dragging him along places.

It had become very clear to them both on that second date that they were better off as friends, but she had been so enthusiastic about attending her first Earth wedding that he hadn’t had the heart to rescind his offer that she attend as his date. He enjoyed her company and had wanted to introduce her to Pidge, so they could discuss the Rose of Lyra findings, and rubbing her in Keith’s face had only occurred to him as a very belated benefit.

“Lance, everything is so beautiful!” Farla exclaimed. She looped her arm in his and managed to eat a delicate canapé with her free hand. “Amongst my people, weddings are so private. The couple retreats to the forest until they receive a sign that their union is accepted or rejected by our gods. But this is so indulgent, there are so many flowers and doilies. I especially love the miniature foods.” She managed to nab another canapé as a harried server passed them on his way to the kitchen. 

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, Farla,” Lance said. “You look beautiful.”

“As do you, Lance,” Farla said, smiling at him. He was sure he was smiling back a little dopily. Her excitement could be infectious. “Also, I’ve been wondering, is it traditional for the groom to lock himself in a room in a state of panic?”

“Uh,” Lance said. “Sadly, it is. Which way did Shiro go?”

Lance managed to pick the lock to Shiro’s bedroom with the toothpick from Farla’s last canapé. He found Shiro with one foot out his bedroom window.

“Why didn’t you leave sooner, if you heard me picking the lock for the past five minutes?” Lance asked. 

Shiro had the decency to look sheepish. “My pants are stuck on the window. They were four hundred dollars.”

Lance closed the door behind himself before he helped untangle one of their fearless leaders from a prison of his own making. Once Shiro was a heap on his bedroom floor, Lance swung an arm around him and settled against the wall. 

“What’s going on, man? You love Curtis,” Lance said. 

“I do, I love him so much,” Shiro said. “I didn’t think I could— have that again.”

Lance tightened his arm around the guy. It was a long way to reach but it was worth it. Shiro shuddered a little.

“I messed things up so badly with Adam, at the end,” Shiro said. “I only ever cared about one thing and it should have been him, but it wasn’t.”

There was a little bit of silence, downstairs more people were arriving and the crowd seemed jubilant if their voices could be trusted. There was laughter and glasses clinking and the occasional back slapping hug.

Lance thought about Allura, for the first time in awhile, without any pain at all. He thought about how when he was with her he had been happier than he thought was possible, but they hadn’t been together long enough to see each other’s flaws. They’d only been together for the exact right amount of time for Lance to have more regrets than memories. 

He thought about how Shiro wasn’t remembering the whole story, maybe just enough to feel like the bad guy. To feel like he could love someone so badly that it destroyed both of them.

“I don’t know all of what happened with you and Adam but I feel like you lost sight of each other at the end,” Lance said. “You didn’t know why he wanted what he wanted and he didn’t understand why you couldn’t stay. You and Curtis have seen each other the whole time. And maybe you’ll lose sight of each other sometimes!” He gestured about the room. “That’s, like, marriage man. My parents love each other and there will be months where they fall out of groove. You just have to keep liking each other enough to work at it.”

Shiro sniffled a little and Lance let him pretend he wasn’t crying when he hid his big dumb face in his hands. 

“You didn’t get the chance to come back and make things right with Adam before he died and that really really sucks,” he said. “But Curtis is right here. He’s your partner. He’s not going anywhere.”

“When did you learn all this stuff?” Shiro said, jostling Lance a little.

“My therapist tells me I’m an old soul,” Lance joked.

They didn’t get a chance for much more because Shiro’s door opened and there was Curtis, in his full suit, grinning crookedly at Shiro.

“You big baby, what’s wrong?” he said.

“Curtis! You can’t see me before the wedding, it’s bad luck!” Shiro said, throwing his hands over his chest which covered almost nothing. 

Curtis shrugged. “Oh well, I’ll break a mirror later, won’t that cancel it out?”

“No! What!” Shiro exclaimed.

Lance decided to leave them to it, he dodged Curtis as he fell to the floor by Shiro’s side and made his way into the hall. He only noticed Keith as he was closing the door behind himself.

“Are you stalking me?” Lance asked.

“At my brother’s wedding?” Keith asked. “Where I’m the best man?”

“You’re dodging the question,” Lance said.

Keith scoffed. “I saw Shiro hanging out his window from outside. I stuck around to make sure he didn’t fall on his head and then I tracked down Curtis.”

“Good thinking, I was just going to therapize him to death,” Lance said. 

Keith raised an eyebrow at him, the slow smile that spread over his face left Lance feeling something akin to dread. He suddenly realized Keith was wearing a fitted suit and his hair was curled intentionally around his face. There was a little bit of eyeliner on each of his stupid sparkling eyes. 

“I heard you're dating someone. Something about a rare plant you rescued from extinction.” Keith leaned back against the wall, legs spread a little. If Lance was still able to he could have stepped right between his knees, pressed himself all along Keith’s front. Held him in place. Messed up his tidy hair.

“Uh,” he said, regaining some brain function. “No, we, it didn’t work out. We’re just friends.”

Keith gave Lance a slow, nearly sleazy once over, then said, “She’s missing out.” He pushed himself off the wall and was down the stairs before Lance had processed what he’d done. 

For awhile, he leaned where Keith had just been leaning and tried to remind himself why they were a bad idea.

+

The ceremony was in Shiro’s backyard. An interesting choice for February, but Pidge made it work with a heat shield that covered most of Shiro’s yard and garden and probably even the neighbor’s fields a few miles down the road. 

Farla held Lance’s arm tightly all through the ceremony, she cried a little when Shiro walked down the aisle even though she’d only met Shiro once before the wedding, when they’d both been at the greenhouse at the same time. Lance couldn’t blame her, because as soon as Shiro made eye contact with Curtis, Curtis’s big immovable smile started wobbling and once he started crying in earnest there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd.

Shiro laughed at him, but he was looking teary as well. Even Keith, who was the only person they’d conceded to being a groomsmen—considering between the two of them they had over a dozen candidates—was standing at the dais with his eyes looking shinier than usual. Lance sure hoped his eyeliner wasn’t waterproof.

Coran was officiating so they got off track several times, but when Curtis was allowed to dip Shiro into a kiss, when the crowd rose to greet them, the first person Shiro looked over at was Lance. He smiled at him for a few moments, Lance hoped he was smiling back, but his entire face was wet and he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. When Shiro looked away, Lance knew he had been saying, thank you, you were right, I love you too.

+

Keith found him by Shiro’s porch swing. Lance had been trying desperately not to remember what they’d done to this poor thing, almost a year ago. But with Keith joining him, it was nearly impossible to forget. 

They were quiet for a bit, just listening to the sounds of the party in the distance. It was winding down, but all of their friends were a loud rowdy crew, no matter how few of them remained.

“How have you been?” Lance asked, surprising himself.

Keith seemed to contemplate the question for a second, swirling his drink. “Good. We just got back from a short mission to New Galra,” he hesitated, “I’m leaving for another undercover mission in a few days.”

“Cool, uh,” Lance said, feeling wrong-footed. He could tell Keith was testing him and he didn’t appreciate it, but he also didn’t blame him. He settled on, “Be careful.”

“Do you remember those— those mermaids?” Keith asked.

“Like Plaxum? And Queen Luxia? What about them?” Lance asked.

“I ran into them on my last mission, they were asking about you. I told them you were doing well.”

“Really! Oh man, I haven’t seen them in forever! How are they?” Lance asked, shaking Keith a little.

“Good, good,” he said, laughing. He told Lance how Queen Luxia’s people were thriving. They’d discovered a way to traverse the galaxy on these fishbowl looking ships. They were looking into new ways to make the many benefits of space travel more accessible to their people, apparently they were working with Space Mall on installing moats. 

“They were pretty bummed neither you or Hunk worked with the Blade. I don’t think they like me very much,” Keith admitted.

“Aw, Keith, I’m sure they love you, they just take awhile to warm up to strangers,” Lance said. 

“They threw you a banquet the moment you arrived.”

“They were being mind controlled,” Lance demurred.

“Sure.” Keith laughed. “I think I’m gonna go find Shiro, if he isn’t, uh, with Curtis somewhere.”

“Good luck,” Lance said. Shiro was definitely upstairs by now, but he didn’t want to traumatize Keith like that. 

Keith paused a few steps away. “It was good to see you, Lance.”

“Yeah,” Lance said. “Same.”

After Keith left, Lance sat on the porch swing and swung himself back and forth a little. So much had changed in the past year. Lance couldn’t even remember exactly how many days it had been since Allura died. He didn’t know how he felt about that, but he was working on it.

“I was hoping to catch you alone,” a man said as he joined Lance on the porch. 

He was a tall, handsome Altean, with broad shoulders, dark skin, and hair as silver as the lining of a cloud. 

Lance put out a foot to stop his swinging. 

“Are you a serial killer?” he asked. 

“Cereal killer? Do humans choke each other to death with breakfast foods?” the man said, stepping a little closer. 

He was wearing typical Altean formal dress, his hands held behind his back. The pink markings on his cheeks glinted softly as he passed the warm light seeping past Shiro’s front windows.

“No!” Lance said, laughing. “A serial killer is like, someone who kills a lot of people, serially. That was just kind of a creepy opening line, dude.”

“I did not intend to alarm you, Paladin. My apologies.” He did a fancy looking bow in Lance’s direction, that sent Lance hurtling to his feet.

“No need for all that, I’m not a paladin anymore. I’m just Lance.” He waved his arms about.

“Lance,” the man said, rising again. He extended his hand and shook Lance’s firmly. “Allow me to start over. I am Raimon of the New Altean Council and I was hoping to have a word with you.”

Raimon smiled at him and Lance could feel a blush rising on his cheeks. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading!! the last two chapters will be posted monday and tuesday for lance's bday!! unless i forget bc i'm moving lol, let's hope i survive


	6. Part 5

There was a knock at the door and Lance turned to find Raimon entering the room. He sighed in relief that it wasn’t Sincline. 

“The council is reconvening in fifteen doboshes,” Raimon said. “Would you like me to tell them you are indisposed?”

“No, that’s fine,” Lance said, readjusting his clothes. The last few times Lance had been invited to these meetings, he had worn casual Earth attire. But Coran had cornered him this time and outfitted him in formal Altean dress. The suit jacket was long and itchy, but it did look more intimidating than his old green field jacket. 

“How are you holding up?” Raimon asked. 

“Fine,” Lance said.

“I have told them many times not to bring up Princess Allura in that manner, especially not as a negotiation tactic,” Raimon said. He was walking in little incensed circles, which was pretty cute.

Lance had gotten to know Raimon very well over the spring. At Shiro’s wedding Raimon had asked Lance to join the New Altean Council in an advisory capacity. He said they could use Lance’s invaluable guidance as they steered New Altea towards a bright future. 

Lance had politely turned him down. Then he had less politely turned him down as Raimon appeared at his greenhouse, the farmer’s market, even drove past him on his evening stroll. At which point Lance had insisted he was behaving more and more like a serial killer and Raimon had insisted he just really needed Lance’s help wrangling thirty ancient Alteans into a progressive frame of mind. At which point Lance had conceded to attending one meeting. One. 

Now, four meetings later, Lance was fairly certain none of the council considered him a temporary member, but a direct mouthpiece for Allura herself. Which was both troubling and frustrating. Everytime he seemed to have convinced them he was just Lance, not their dead heir to the throne, one of them would bring her up again as if she was right there in the room. It felt like trying to keep chickens in an unlocked coop. It made Lance keep coming back.

Shiro had always said he was stubborn. Well, he’d said Keith and Lance were always trying to out-stubborn each other, but same difference.

“It’s fine, Raimon,” Lance said, catching him by the shoulder. “At least Sincline isn’t at today’s meetings.”

“Ah, yes, he is unwell,” Raimon said. He lowered his voice. “I only wish I was the reason why.”

“Raimon!” Lance chuckled.

“Number Four, the meeting is about to resume— Ah, Councilman Raimon,” Coran said as he entered without knocking.

“Coran, Keith isn’t here. There’s no need to pretend he’s taller than me,” Lance said.

Coran was watching Raimon with narrowed eyes, but he snapped out of it just long enough to usher Lance towards the door. 

“No need to be jealous, Number Four. Once you hit second puberty I’m sure you’ll far outgrow Keith,” Coran reassured him.

“Second what? How many puberties do Alteans have?”

“However many is necessary! I’m not sure I want to know how humans go about it,” Coran said, shuddering. He kept on shoving Lance down the hall, until it was clear Raimon had fallen behind. At which point Lance managed to overpower him and came to a halt in an empty alcove.

“Coran, do you not like Raimon or something?” Lance asked.

“Why would you suggest that? It would be incredibly unprofessional for me to have such ill will towards a fellow councilmember. I respect Councilman Raimon the normal amount!” Coran said, flailing his hands around his head.

Lance crossed his arms and stared Coran down until the man went limp and defeated.

“Councilman Raimon is perfectly respectable, I just thought you and Number Three would have worked things out by now. Everytime I see you two together I can see the look on the Red Paladin’s grumpy little face—”

“His what?” Lance said. “Coran, do you think Raimon and I are dating?”

“Yes, because you are? Everyone knows, Lance, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Everyone, who?!” Lance asked, grabbing Coran by the shoulders and shaking him a little.

“There you are,” Raimon said, nearly out of breath. Nearly, because Lance hadn’t seen him lose his composure outside little bursts of emotion in locked rooms, since they’d met.

“Yes, there you are,” another voice chimed in. 

Lance felt like slime was dripping down his back as he turned to find Sincline reaching for him. Luckily, Raimon and Coran casually blocked his way. Sincline smiled a little peeved smile. He looked disturbingly like Lotor. Tall and linear with long smooth hair. He was always smiling at Lance like a vulture circling a piece of meat. He was, by far, Lance’s most hated member of the New Altean Council. And he wasn’t supposed to be here. 

“Councilman Sincline,” Lance said. “I heard you were unwell.”

“I’ve recovered,” Sincline said. Everything he said sounded like a threat somehow. He gestured towards the meeting chamber. “Shall we?”

Lance steeled himself for another difficult meeting and entered the room first.

+

He was trying to find a good hiding spot from the council members after the meeting when Keith found him. He was in his Blade of Marmora uniform and keeping pace with Kolivan when they nearly ran into each other going around a corner.

“Lance,” Keith said, coming to attention. He looked anxious but not surprised to see him on New Altea, which was annoying. Their friends gossipped too much.

“Keith,” Lance said, turning to look up at the other man. “Kolivan.”

“Paladin,” Kolivan said, nodding. He never looked amused but somehow, he looked amused. His big bushy eyebrows were twitching, which was the closest to laughter Lance had ever seen the man.

“What are you doing here?” Lance asked them both, trying not to seem like he was staring at Keith’s dumb face. He had another scar along his temple, running through his right eyebrow. 

“I’ll let Kogane brief you, if that’s suitable. I must speak with Councilman Raimon.” Kolivan left before Lance could agree that plan was ‘suitable’ or not.

“Come along Kogane,” Lance said, “to my ready room!”

He led Keith briskly to his guest chambers, where he spent most of his time hiding while he wasn’t in council meetings or eating intricate, stressful meals in the Great Hall. It wasn’t until the door was closed behind them that he felt even remotely relaxed. 

Keith was gazing out the window, when Lance turned to look at him. Outside was a view of all of New Altea. It was more vibrant and populated than Lance had wanted to imagine, back when Altea was just a place he knew that had been mercilessly destroyed. Something about seeing the sheer beauty and vibrance of this planet and its people made him feel closer and further apart from Allura than ever before. He couldn’t imagine the pain she had carried knowing this had all been obliterated, but working every day to make it better gave him an inkling of how she must have felt.

“We’re building a new school right over there,” Lance pointed. “It’s going to have classes about sustainable farming practices and extracurriculars for piloting. We’re visiting this abandoned school building on the edge of the city tomorrow and if it's in decent shape we’re going to turn it into a flight school. I’ve also been trying to get the council behind my ice cream parlor idea, but Alteans really don’t understand the concept of milking.”

“Do you,” Keith said so quickly, he nearly cut Lance off. “It sounds like— I’m glad—”

“Are you malfunctioning?” Lance asked.

Keith licked his lips, he was no longer looking out the window and his hands were balled into fists. For the first time Lance noticed how subdued Keith was acting. He could barely meet Lance’s eyes.

“I’m happy for you,” Keith said. “Raimon seems like a good guy. The work you’re doing here is really incredible.”

Lance yelled something indecipherable and grabbed Keith by his shoulders. “Do you think I’m dating Raimon too? Why does everyone think that?”

Keith frowned at him like he was speaking ancient Altean. Maybe he was. Nobody seemed to be hearing him.

“There were articles about you both, in Space Weekly,” Keith said.

“ _ You _ read Space Weekly?” Lance asked.

“Shiro does, he texted me,” Keith said. He procured his phone from a secret pocket that Lance was immediately jealous of and turned it to show Lance. 

Shiro had taken a blurry photo of the front cover of last month’s Space Weekly. Where Lance and Raimon were walking in a public park, arm in arm. The headline read:  **Blue Paladin & Councilman Raimon’s Secret Engagement?? An inside source tells all!**

“I bet it was Sincline, that slippery coat hanger,” Lance muttered. There was something about this rumor that didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attracted to Raimon, but if he went around dating everyone that he was attracted to Lance doubted he’d have time for anything else.

“Are you okay?” Keith asked.

“I’m not dating Raimon! We’re just coworkers,” Lance said. “Can’t I just be on the New Altean Council because I give really good advice? Not because of Raimon? Well, I mean, Raimon did seek me out. But not because of that! Because of the advice thing!”

“Oh,” Keith said. “I knew that part. Raimon wasn’t the only one trying to hire you, he was just the only one who found you.”

“Excuse me?” Lance asked, hands falling from Keith’s shoulders. 

He couldn’t tell if Keith started blushing at the loss of contact or the look on Lance’s face. Maybe both.

“I may have misled some people,” Keith said, turning away. “I thought you were done with this kind of thing. I didn’t want you being hounded.”

“Oh,” Lance said. “Well, I was done, so thanks I guess. But I think they need me here,” he sat on the bed, “I wasn’t going to keep coming back, but the first meeting Sincline tried to defund the music program at Altea University. Then Councilman Hak didn’t know what the budget was for the Homeless Initiative and I realized, they were listening to me?” It came out sounding like a question, but Lance knew it was a fact. 

“They do, I wouldn’t trust anyone else with this. So. I’m glad it's you,” Keith said. He slowly, hesitantly, joined Lance on the bed. With several feet between them. 

The last time they’d been anywhere near a bed together, Keith’s packed duffel had been at the other end of it. Lance shot to his feet. 

“So how’s it going in the Blade?” Lance asked, waving his hands about and pacing like a madman. He was trying to make it less obvious that he couldn’t sit together on his bed with Keith and pretend everything was just fine. But he was afraid he’d had the opposite effect.

Keith sat with his elbows resting on his knees, staring at his feet, perfectly still. Until he looked up and met Lance’s gaze. 

“Why did you end things that day?” Keith asked.

“What day?” Lance asked, feigning nonchalance.

“Lance,” Keith said. “That day. You said if I left with the Blade it was over between us. I’ve thought about it a lot this past year. I’ve turned it over and over in my head.”

“Careful there, don’t want to hurt yourself,” Lance tried to joke, luckily Keith ignored him.

“I thought it was because of the danger, because you didn’t want to sit at home and wonder if I wasn’t coming back. I thought you were done with all of this,” Keith said, gesturing around the undeniably fancy Altean guest room. “And I didn’t blame you! Well, I mean,” he shrugged, “after I simmered down. I didn’t blame you. You have been through so much.”

“Yes, sure, we all have,” Lance said, crossing his arms. “Is there a question here?”

“What I’m asking is, if you’re going to be on the council and you’re not gonna live on the farm for the rest of your life, why did you break up with me?” Keith asked. “And don’t say it's because we weren’t meant to be, because we are. In every universe. We always are.”

The truth was, Lance didn’t know anymore. When Keith had left, he’d felt nothing but fear and loss. Emotions he’d thought he’d be avoiding by ending their relationship. 

He’d thought he could live on his family farm, eating three square meals, doing his chores, and abiding by a strict routine for the rest of his life. There was nothing wrong with routine, especially in the darkest of times. His therapist had taught him that. But Lance as a person had never been one to limit himself for long. He craved chaos, structured chaos, but chaos all the same.

He hadn’t wanted to leave his family in case he never returned and he didn’t want Keith to leave in case he never came back. But now that he’d grappled with both of those possibilities he’d realized he couldn’t stop doing things he loved and craved just because they made him scared.

Hunk was off bringing accessible nutritional diets to neglected planets. Pidge was working with her family on new and innovative tech that was going to make people’s lives better. Shiro and Curtis were touring on the Atlas. Coran had dozens of important jobs here on New Altea. And Keith put his life on the line every day for a cause he believed in. They were all making a difference. And Lance had been making a difference on the farm, but it was a slow and steady progress, something he wouldn’t see the results of for a long time. It was nice to walk into the council chambers and make a difference that very day in the lives of people he cared about. Maybe he did still have something to prove. 

And maybe some of this was Keith’s fault too. Maybe they should have talked about these kinds of things from the start, instead of losing track of their reality in the comfort of Lance’s bed. But that had all been a long time ago now and Lance was done with maybes.

He looked at Keith for the first time in what seemed like an impossibly long time and found himself still wanting. 

There was a knock on the door, startling their glances from each other.

“Councilman Lance, the session will resume in five doboshes,” a voice called.

“Oh crap, I thought we were done for today,” Lance muttered. He grabbed his suit jacket from where he’d tossed it earlier and tugged it over his shoulders. 

Keith was standing with a sigh, looking like a man approaching the gallows.

“After this,” Lance said. “You’re staying right?”

Keith nodded, his expression lightening a fraction. 

“Meet me here and we can talk,” Lance said.

He left Keith in his doorway, looking wary but hopeful. As he made his way towards the council chambers he found a rare skip in his step, things seemed to be working in their favor for once.

And then, of course, something hit him over the head.

+

He woke to Sincline standing over him. Never a good sign. He was tied to a table, loose, unpracticed knots on each of his limbs. So Sincline was evil, but probably new at it. He could work with that.

“Councilman Lance, you’re likely alarmed to wake up in such a situation.” Sincline preened.

“Not really.”

“Surely, you’re wondering why I’ve taken you to this place?” He gestured grandly around the room.

Lance had seen pictures of this building in their briefing a couple days ago, they were supposed to come to this school house tomorrow morning in the hopes it would be a good location for a flight school. Sincline had chosen an abandoned building at the edge of town, for nefarious purposes, shocking.

“Can you cut to the chase, Sincline? I’m sure there’s a reason you brought me here, besides boring me to death,” Lance said. 

While Sincline took offense to that, Lance wiggled his right foot free of his bindings and started working on his left. He saw an array of strange tools set up on a table nearby and he didn’t want to wait to see what Sincline intended to do with them. 

Instead as Sincline monologued about quintessence and Lance’s markings and something disturbing about Lance’s relationship with Allura, Lance shimmied free. It seemed he’d been caught up in some creep’s weird plan to bring Allura back through her leftover quintessence on his face. Weird and terrifying. He put that in a box to unpack later. 

Sincline threw his arms out and a few Altean pigeons flew from the rafters, startling the man long enough for Lance to hit him over the head with a chair. He went down like a sack of needlessly expensive bricks. 

“Now that’s how you tie a knot,” Lance groused as he tied Sincline to the same table he’d been tied to.

After, it didn’t seem like Sincline had brought a communication device with him. So Lance left the schoolhouse and started in the direction of where he was fairly sure there was a nearby town. He hadn’t been on the road for ten minutes before a Marmora ship appeared over him and touched down nearby. It sent dirt and rocks flying towards Lance’s vulnerable face, leaving him in a grouchy mood. 

A mood that lifted embarrassingly quick once Keith was racing toward him. Before Lance could even lift a hand in greeting, Keith had his arms around him, holding him tight to his chest.

Lance felt like that was the appropriate time to admit that, yes, despite Sincline’s incompetence and annoying disposition, he’d been scared. He tucked his face into the crook of Keith’s neck and brought his arms up Keith’s back, pressing their fronts together.

“Are you okay?” Keith asked.

Lance nodded, but he didn’t have the energy to do more than shudder as Keith passed his hands over his sides. Keith gently pushed him away to scan his front, which is when Lance realized he was checking for injuries.

“Keith, I’m fine, I—”

Suddenly, he was being lifted into the air by someone that wasn’t Keith. He panicked for a split second before a voice yelled “Lance!” right in his ear. Hunk. He went boneless so quick it was nearly distressing.

“Buddy,” Lance said, wrapping his noodle arms around his friend’s neck. “Jeez, how long was I missing?”

“Six hours,” Pidge said, from below them. He felt her join the hug somewhere around his knees. “Shiro’s almost here too, he’s going to be sad he missed all the action.”

“Action? I saved myself! There was no action!” Lance said.

Hunk put him down on his feet, but he still felt floppy. He leaned against his favorite Yellow Paladin and pretended it wasn’t because his legs felt like rubber.

Keith was having a murmured conversation with Kolivan which Lance assumed meant Sincline had been apprehended, considering Keith wasn’t running off with a knife in hand.

“You didn’t all have to come,” Lance said.

“Of course we did!” Hunk said, rubbing his shoulder. 

“Keith was freaking out,” Pidge said. “We’re mostly here as his moral support.”

“I was not!” Keith snapped. Kolivan must have not been happy with the interruption because Keith turned bright red and stomped off to finish his call.

“He was,” Pidge whispered. “Anyways, I knew you’d be fine.”

She was betrayed by the fact that she had scanned him for injuries with her latest Rover model at least five times. 

“You have a minor concussion and rope abrasions,” Pidge said. 

“We should get you back to the castle,” Hunk said, ushering him onto the ship. 

Lance felt so safe and at ease, surrounded and loved by some of his favorite people, that he took the opportunity right there on the boarding ramp to pass the fuck out.


	7. After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy lance's birthday!!! i'm sorry i didn't post yesterday, this move has me exhausted, but this fic is finally complete! may fuck around and write more in this universe eventually, we'll see ;)
> 
> thanks to @annaincognita for the inspiration! and thanks to everyone who has given kudos or written a comment, i really appreciate it!

Keith was on the roof of the castle, when Shiro found him. Considering they had never been to the New Altean castle together before, Keith didn’t know whether he should be impressed that Shiro knew exactly where he’d be or depressed that he’d become so predictable.

“Lance woke up,” Shiro said.

“I know, Kolivan told me,” Keith said.

“So is there a reason you’re out here, instead of inside waiting on him, hand and foot?”

“You’re one to talk,” Keith said. He’d been on the Atlas a few months ago when Curtis had an allergic reaction to an Arusian fruit platter. Shiro had fretted more than helped the situation.

Shiro just lowered himself beside Keith on the roof, settling in for what was sure to be one of his infamous interrogations.

“Before he got kidnapped, Lance said he wanted to talk with me. I’m assuming, about us,” Keith admitted.

“That’s great!” Shiro said. At a dark look from Keith, Shiro continued, “What? It is, I can’t imagine Lance would want to hash it out again unless he wanted to get back together.”

“Lance never says what I expect him to,” Keith said.

“For the record, I still agree with Lance,” Shiro said. 

“I’m  _ your  _ brother!”

“Yes, you are. Which means when your boyfriend tells you he doesn’t want you going off into space throwing your life away for a cause that doesn’t exist anymore, I tend to agree with him.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Keith said. “And that’s not the whole reason, I don’t know the whole reason.”

“No,” Shiro acknowledged. “And Lance wasn’t entirely right, he was also very scared. You two started something very soon after, well,” Shiro trailed off just long enough to find Keith’s shoulder and pat it. “I think you’ve both grown now, you’ve spent some time apart and understand yourselves better than before. I wish I’d gotten that with Adam.”

“ _ Don’t _ pull the Adam card,” Keith said, dangerously close to crying. 

“Fine, fine,” Shiro said, hands up placatingly. He stood and walked carefully back to the window they’d both come out of. “You know there’s always a spot for you on the Atlas.”

“Who would keep Kolivan company?”

“Your mom!” Shiro yelled, diving through the window.

“Ew! Shiro!” Keith yelled after him.

He sat on the roof awhile longer, until he saw a figure hobbling into the castle garden far below. Even in the dark, in a strange place, with only a shadowed profile to go on, Keith knew it was Lance. He pried himself from his roof tile and made his way after him.

He remembered the past year as snapshots.

Shiro’s house warming party, Lance’s neck exposed in the moonlight of the porch. The weeks after, getting to know each other in new and fascinating ways. His duffel on the end of Lance’s bed, how he didn’t know he was already leaving him as he stuffed one of Lance’s shirts under his uniform. Missions blurring together until they met again at Lance’s birthday, at his birthday, at Shiro’s wedding. 

Yelling at each other on the viewing deck of the Atlas until Lance turned to him and said, “Maybe we just weren’t meant to be.” 

He’d stood frozen in place staring at the spot Lance used to be for several moments after that, holding a dripping cup of lukewarm coffee. Until Slav scared the shit out of him, appearing in the doorway with a datapad pressed to his face.

“He’s wrong you know,” Slav had said. “In 98.4 percent of all other universes you are meant to be, so it's statistically unlikely you wouldn’t be in this one.”

“What about the other 2 percent?” Keith had snapped at him.

Slav had looked up from his datapad, straight into Keith’s eyes and said, “You’re dead. Or he’s dead. You’re either together or you can’t be. Shiro wants you on the bridge.”

The door had closed behind him with a finality that had left Keith reeling for months. 

And then he’d been waiting in Lance’s room just recently, sitting on his bed thinking of what he was going to say to him. How he was going to finally make things right between them. He’d had all sorts of ideas, goals, aspirations, for how to keep him this time. He’d been weedling away at Kolivan for months, about turning the Blade into less of a secret undercover organization and more of a humanitarian effort. 

The war had been won. It was time they started doing good outside of the shadows. He wanted to use Lance’s family’s farm to help provide food to communities that were still rebuilding. Lance had learned so much about sustainable farming and had helped literally bring formerly extinct plants back to life. With the help of the Blade they could do some real good in this new liberated universe.

Mostly though. Mostly he was tired of being away from Lance. He wanted to be home.

He thought of all of this as he joined Lance on the bench in the castle garden.

“It’s about time,” Lance said. He had a crutch he’d tossed on the ground, which could have been concerning but Keith knew he’d passed out from the dehydration and stress and was probably fine without it. “Where have you been? Up in your tower?”

Keith grunted. He grabbed Lance’s hand and put it in his lap.

“Keith?” Lance asked, sounding half pleased, half scandalized.

“We’re gonna talk about this,” Keith said.

“Sure, we’ll do lots of talking.”

“I have a plan, plans, for how to make this work. We’ll listen to each other this time.”

“Because that’s our strong suit.” Lance laughed.

“I don’t want to go anywhere you don’t go,” Keith said. “We’re like identical poles, we just keep circling and circling and then when we come together we end up flying apart.”

“I didn’t know you were such a poet,” Lance said. He was licking his lips.

“Is that a yes?” 

“Depends,” Lance said. “Are you going to kiss me or not?”

He was. He did. He kept at it. Until Lance was flushed and breathless and probably near to passing out again.

He thought about planets and gravity and how he’d met this person so many times and for every time they’d met they’d changed in corresponding ways. They would always orbit each other, but for now he’d like to orbit within arms reach.

“Is that all you got?” Lance asked when Keith pulled away. His lips were swollen and pink and Keith rubbed a calloused thumb along the bottom one, just to watch Lance shiver.

“I’m just getting started,” Keith promised.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed! :D


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